This year I have imposed a new rule: I will buy no books until our annual trip to Ithaca in the fall. I really really need to read up on my own library! I will make a couple of exceptions for special events, like Nickel City Con in June, where I’ll most likely want to buy some graphic novels. But other than that, I’m not buying books until October.
Unless, of course, something really unusual happens, like, say…the folks at Taschen offering a sale in which a bunch of their titles are 85% off.
Taschen makes gorgeous books. They are the creme de la creme of the “coffee table book”, just stunning volumes on many topics (mostly the arts) that are amazing objects in themselves, as well as just being high-quality all the way around. And the prices align with that quality: it’s not unusual for a Taschen book to cost hundreds of dollars (here’s a case in point). So when I got the email that Taschen was having a huge sale, I had to look. I consoled myself with the knowledge that they probably wouldn’t be marking down any titles that I actually wanted, but at least I could look, right?
Ahem.
Something like $150 later, the box containing these arrived. And that box was heavy. That James Bond book? That one alone probably weighs at least twenty pounds. The Audrey Hepburn book is also a weighty tome. I had to get the Star Wars book, obviously, especially since I already own the companion volume that chronicles the Original Trilogy. And what budding photographer doesn’t need a nice history of photography? Especially one that is produced under the auspices of the George Eastman House, a museum in Rochester that is devoted to photography (and a place I did not even know about)?
Another thing I’ve noticed about my book-selection tendencies nowadays is that I’m leaning more heavily toward books that are beautiful in themselves as well as selecting for content. More on that later sometime, though….
